The sublime object of psychiatry: schizophrenia in clinical and cultural theory

Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. The Sublime object of Psychiatry studies representations of schizophreniaacross a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. It has also served as a metaphor for cultural theoriststo interpret modern and postmodern understandings of the self. These radical,compelling, and puzzling appropriations of clinical accounts of schizophreniahave been dismissed by many as illegitimate, insensitive and inappropriate. Until now, no attempt has been made to analyse them systematically, nor has their significance for our broaderunderstanding of this most 'ununderstandable' of experiences been addressed.The Sublime Object of Psychiatry is the first book to study representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. In part one, Woods offers a fresh analysis of the foundational clinical accounts of schizophrenia, concentrating on the work of Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In the second part of thebook, she examines how these accounts were critiqued, adapted, and mobilised in the 'cultural theory' of R D Laing, Thomas Szasz, Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, Louis Sass, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Using the aesthetic concept of the sublime as an organising framework, Woods explainshow a clinical diagnostic category came to be transformed into a potent metaphor in cultural theory, and how, in that transformation, schizophrenia came tobe associated with the everyday experience of modern and postmodern life.Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, andfor which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', but instead brings clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'. INDICE: Clinical Theory Psychiatry on schizophrenia: clinical pictures of a sublime object Schizophrenia: the sublime text of psychoanalysis Cultural Theory Antipsychiatry: schizophrenic experience and the sublime Anti-Oedipus andthe politics of the schizophrenic sublime Schizophrenia, modernity, postmodernity Postmodern schizophrenia Glamorama, postmodernity and the schizophrenic sublime Conclusion

• ISBN: 978-0-19-958395-9
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 272
• Fecha Publicación: 25/08/2011
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés